Will the digital revolution doom us to amuse ourselves to death? Israeli director Ari Folman (“Waltz With Bashir”) poses that question aggressively and sometimes beautifully in his near-future fantasy “The Congress.”

Jumping off from “The Futurological Congress,” Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem’s 1971 novel about a world controlled with drugs, Folman pivots his half-live action, half-animated film on Robin Wright playing a fictional “Robin Wright.” Like her real-life counterpart, this Wright didn’t pursue pop superstardom after “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Forrest Gump” (1984). Unlike Wright, she let her acting career wane, partly because of her devotion to her son, who suffers from Usher syndrome (which leads to deafness and blindness) and her daughter, a frustrated teenager.

Seeking security for her kids, she reluctantly accepts a proposal from the head of fictional Miramount Studios (Danny Huston) that she undergo a computer scan of her body and face, in every pose and expression, so he can create the trashy star vehicles he always wanted from her. The digital alias will be super-busy playing a super-heroine. The actual actor must never act again, not even in community theaters.

And that’s just for starters. Twenty years later, Miramount – now part of a global mega-corporation, Miramount Nagasaki – succeeds in reducing actors to a chemical formula. Fans will be able to swallow their idols in pill form and become them. In Folman’s update of Lem’s vision, traditional notions of reality become relics as consumers pop their pills and catapult themselves into a psychedelic alternate world. Executives at Miramount Nagasaki reap profits from this process. They succeed at convincing people everywhere that living in a chemistry-fueled circus is nonstop, narcotizing fun.

As Wright motors into a glitzy Southwestern resort city where this next leap forward will be announced, the movie morphs from live action to surreal animation. Drawing on non-Disney American animators, notably the Fleischer Brothers (who did Betty Boop, Popeye and the original Superman cartoons), Folman and his animation team, headed by Yoni Goldman, create a lush, disquieting pastiche. It resembles, in its ever-changing perspectives and plethora of pop references, a nightmare version of the Beatles cartoon “Yellow Submarine.” It grows ever more phantasmagoric as the chemical revolution takes hold.

In short, the movie is a howl of pain at the technological and corporate takeover of our fantasy lives – and, increasingly, our real lives.

Unfortunately, Folman proves his point in the most self-destructive way. He makes “The Congress” sharp as live-action dramedy and woefully woozy as hallucinogenic cartoon. His frames are full of invention and intrigue, but as the cartoon Wright goes in and out of sanity and even consciousness, the comedy-drama grows faint and the satire wears thin. A rebellion breaks out and falls apart without explanation. If the new reality is a gaudy fraud, the old reality endures only as a gray place where you wait to die without diversion. The heroine’s would-be guardian angel (voiced by Jon Hamm), the animation director who turned her into a digital goddess, at one point disappears into thin, hot air; we’re told he simply went “with the flow.”

Luckily, Wright acts so wholeheartedly that we keep rooting for her character even when she’s dazed or trapped in ultra-stylized animated form. Laurence Olivier once said that until he reached his 40s, he felt uncomfortable playing heroes – his tendency had been to mock them. Maybe something similar has happened with Wright at age 48. In “The Congress,” she gives a towering performance as a blooming idealist, even when she’s a cartoon figure drawn with super-sized eyes. She sings a Leonard Cohen song with stirring clarity, bringing full-bodied pathos to words like “If it be your will/ That a voice be true/ From this broken hill/ I will sing to you.”

Folman has the sense to draw Huston’s studio head with such broad, sharp strokes that he comes off as a wicked cartoon right from the start. In “The Congress,” Huston parallels his father John’s character in “Chinatown” – he always wants more power, especially over the future. It’s a gloomy riot to hear this carnivorous honcho laud digital moviemaking for removing the pesky temperaments of actors. (Later, in animated form, he praises chemistry for eliminating the tricky sensibilities of writers and animators.)

The movie rests on three peak accomplishments: Wright’s poetic connection to her ailing, imaginative son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), her adversarial relationship with her blunt, smart daughter (Sami Gayle), and her unexpectedly deep bond with her agent (Harvey Keitel). As a big-hearted hustler whose street wisdom holds no sway on the new digital highway, Keitel is both delightful and moving. He and Wright pull off a stunning actors’ duet when she walks into the geodesic scanning device and he elicits laughter, thoughtfulness and tears by confessing the funny-sordid roots of his life as an agent.

The movie is worth seeing just for the moments when Wright’s agent tells her he loves her. Emotions like that make “The Congress” an adult dystopia. When was the last time you saw one of those?

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